ESSAY; She Stoops to Conquer

By Naomi Wolf

Published: July 24, 2005

Edward Klein's new book, ''The Truth About Hillary,'' is not a biography, to be evaluated in terms of how well or poorly it relates to real events or a real person; it is something much more revealing -- a kind of cultural dreamwork, like that in 18th-century penny ballads that linked real political figures to folklore, giving them supernatural traits. In the stories that Klein tells, we can clearly see the collective unconscious of our culture at work, throwing up vivid, even lurid fantasies that emerge out of the shifting balance of power between women and men.

These stories are not new. If you look at the historical reaction to women who have pushed or broken social boundaries in Western societies, you will often see the same themes put forth, and for the same reasons.

A perfect example is suggested by Lyndall Gordon's new biography of Mary Wollstonecraft, ''Vindication.'' Clinton and Wollstonecraft -- two heroines, or antiheroines, separated by two centuries -- share many superficial similarities. The mothers of both suffered neglect or abuse; Wollstonecraft's mother was beaten by her husband, and Clinton's mother was effectively abandoned as a child. Both heroines, as young women, focused on the proper education of children, and on children's right to a safe and nurturing environment; both created a power base for their activism that was made up of talented women (Wollstonecraft started a school with an all-female staff and lived for years in an all-female extended community, and the strong female players in Hillary Clinton's brain trust have been well documented); both, in spite of strong assertions of feminist principles, fell in love with charming and charismatic men who were eloquent and politically idealistic -- Wollstonecraft's lover, the American revolutionary Gilbert Imlay, is eerily of a type with Bill Clinton -- and unfaithful to the mothers of their children. Each rascal dragged the devoted consort into a hell of public humiliation. Imlay's infidelities locked Wollstonecraft into the old story of sexual surrender and betrayal -- victimization -- which she despised, as Hillary Clinton would in her own time.

Each woman nonetheless undertook arduous efforts to advance her companion's professional interests -- Mary Wollstonecraft by hunting down a lost cargo of Imlay's across Northern Europe, and Hillary -- well, you know. Both men cast the women in question as being essential to their success -- while failing to curtail their infidelities. Each woman was the most famous -- and infamous -- woman of her day, and each was noted for her ability to absorb setbacks and blows and keep moving toward the goal of a world in which women would have an enlarged scope for their abilities.

The attacks on both are of a piece as well, and boringly predictable to those who study the history of women. First, there is the ''sexually unfeminine'' strategy: though Lyndall Gordon notes the many firsthand accounts of Wollstonecraft's attractiveness, a counter-story of her as being dirty and physically unappealing arose nonetheless: a member of her circle, Henry Fuseli, ''called her undressed hair 'lank' ''; she was a ''philosophical sloven,'' as Gordon writes. ''This is the image of the unfeminine intellectual, dear to misogynist tradition. . . . The function of the slur was to undermine a woman who enters the male citadel.'' +After Mary's death, when the political winds shifted in the direction of conservatism, she was recast as a ''wanton,'' and a distorted portrait of her was circulated, showing ''a brash, unintelligent face under a masculine hat'' -- contradicting almost all other known images of her. She was depicted as being a sexual predator -- ''very amorous'' -- though she was also sometimes reviled as a prude. After she and William Godwin married, he came in for abuse as being, in essence, emasculated by Mary's feminism:

''The Truth About Hillary'' revels in insinuations that recall all these strategies, in the way they devalue the example of a feminist political leader. Edward Klein is obsessed with Hillary Clinton's appearance, to begin with. He dwells on her ''nice figure'' as a young woman but goes into grotesque, entirely speculative detail about her later ''silhouette.'' He claims for Hillary, as Fuseli did for Mary, a ''neglect of personal grooming'' and has one of his many unnamed sources depict a young Hillary as being ''fully clothed,'' prudishly, in bed, ''I guess to ward off any unwanted sexual advances.'' Klein quotes with relish the detractors who, like William Godwin's critics, see an egalitarian marriage as unmanning to the husband: ''It all went to prove,'' Klein writes, ''that Bill Clinton could 'not even control his wife.' ''

The similarities between the lives continue. During a time of counterrevolution (or ''backlash''), an array of books appeared attacking Wollstonecraft -- though in her case these were novels featuring anti-heroines based on her, and widely read as ''warnings against independent girls who wreck their lives.'' Along with the ''volleys of slanders'' fired at her reputation by Prime Minister William Pitt's ''propaganda machine,'' it all made up a kind of ''vast conspiracy,'' if not in her case a right-wing one. Wollstonecraft's example was shunned for the next 100 years as being one that, if followed, would break down ''bars intended to restrain licentiousness,'' while Hillary Clinton has seen her sex life become a subject of fixation. As Wollstonecraft was in her time, Clinton is seen as being at once a would-be lesbian, frigid and sexually assertive (a neat trick for any one woman to accomplish).

It is in his subtext about lesbianism that Klein's id-projections veer into truly illuminating hysteria: he sees a lesbian under every bed. One of Clinton's advisers ''looked like the Marlboro man in drag.'' Another is a ''dominatrix.'' ''Melanie'' -- actually Melanne -- Verveer is called ''her dark-haired mannish-looking chief of staff.'' (All of these women are heterosexuals, but never mind.) Klein quotes rumors about Donna Shalala and Janet Reno's sexuality -- ''their orientations are shrouded in deep ambiguity.'' Twice, he manages to assign lesbianism to Hillary while never claiming she is attracted to or involved with women: ''To Arkansans, she walked like a lesbian, talked like a lesbian and looked like a lesbian. Ergo, she was a lesbian,'' he writes. Another neat trick: Klein writes that with the ''gender feminism'' of the era, you didn't even have to be a lesbian to be a ''lesbian'': ''To be a lesbian, it was not necessary for a woman to have a physical relationship with another woman,'' he helpfully explains. (Never has a right-wing attack cited lesbian pop-culture maven Rita Mae Brown so respectfully.)

While lesbianism as such lacked a name when Mary Wollstonecraft was alive, the implications of attacks on her were similar. If women like Mary Wollstonecraft -- and now, Hillary Clinton -- get their way, the nightmare posits, we are looking at a female-dominant society, a world with little use for men. That is ultimately the shared ''counterrevolutionary'' impulse in these comparable attacks.

Interestingly, Mary Wollstonecraft's attitude to the inevitable attacks she engendered is one that Clinton might do well to emulate. Where Clinton has at times been hurt in the public's opinion by appearing highhanded or defensive in response to criticism, or implausibly pretending it is not taking place, Wollstonecraft never thought she was entitled to go uncriticized. She was woman enough to pay the price for the change she called for -- because she kept in mind that the struggle was not really about her. She lived her life in service to a larger vision:

''Those who are bold enough to advance before the age they live in,'' she wrote, ''must learn to brave censure. We ought not to be too anxious respecting the opinion of others.''